The study of hunger and all degrees of food insecurity should be part of the basic curriculum for all Nutrition Science students. Not having access to the food we need to maintain our health and well-being, when it is possible to produce enough food for everyone, can be considered the greatest failing of our society in the 21st century.
Introduction
Unfortunately, 1 in 10 human beings do not have access to enough food to ensure their health, and many of these die of hunger . Despite all this, there are still many who do not consider this a central issue. Martin Caparrós addressed this issue in an unforgettable way in the introduction to his seminal work "Hunger" (2014): "Every year that passes, the destruction of tens of millions of men, women, and children by hunger constitutes the scandal of our time. Every five seconds, a child under ten years old dies of hunger on a planet that, nevertheless, overflows with riches. In fact, in its current state, agriculture could easily feed 12 billion human beings, that is, almost double the planet's population today. We are not, therefore, facing a fatality. In the world – in this world – 25,000 people die every day from causes related to hunger. If the reader takes the trouble to read this book, if they become enthusiastic and read it in – say – eight hours, in that interval 8,000 people will have died of hunger. 8,000 is a lot of people. If they don't bother, those people will have died anyway, but they will have the luck of not having..." It's well known. (But if you read this short paragraph in half a minute, know that, in that time, only between eight and ten people died of hunger in the world, so breathe a sigh of relief.)
Beyond being an ethical problem, hunger is also a complex scientific issue that goes beyond simply producing and distributing food to those in need. Understanding and debating its complexity is the best way to engage our community of nutritionists in the topic and motivate them to find a solution. This is a subject of particular interest to those interested in Food and Nutrition Policy, and that is why we have been studying it for quite some time. We hope that this text, now published in “Pensar Nutrição” and which follows the line of thought and transcribes part of two texts previously published in the magazine “Visão” and the newspaper “Público” , can contribute to deepening and broadening this discussion to more people.
Famines, or a population suffering from hunger, have always been a political embarrassment
The first issue that arises when discussing these matters is the apparent invisibility of the topic in our daily lives. Generally, hunger is associated with an excessively large number of people affected, in a distant country, and the topic is rarely discussed in terms of its causes. Famines are rarely discussed publicly because the last thing a leader wants to admit is that they have failed in their responsibility to provide their population with the most precious commodity, food. Hence, excuses for hunger, or those blamed or named as responsible for hunger, are almost as old as hunger itself. Mencius, one of Confucius' most famous disciples, who lived between 372 and 289 BC, writes in one of his most important works, addressing the Emperor: “Your dogs and pigs eat men's food, and the Lord does not stop them. People are dying of hunger, and the Lord does not give them the reserves of their granaries. When people die, the Lord says: 'It is not my fault, it was written in the calendar.' How is that different from stabbing a man and killing him and saying – 'It was not me; it was the knife.' Your Majesty, stop blaming the calendar, and instantly the people and the whole nation will be on your side.”
Although this type of response is part of human history, and many of history's food crises have had a natural origin later mixed with human negligence, there have been few instances where political leaders have assumed their share of responsibility. This has made it difficult to study famine, understand its causes, and attempt to find solutions for its prevention. Generally, long after the events have occurred, it is historians who, in a more or less incomplete way, attempt to describe many of these problems. Two examples and some recent exceptions illustrate this reality.
Famines in Cape Verde
Despite famine being recurrent in Cape Verde (practically from the 16th century until the mid-20th century) and the islands' administrative records documenting at least 27 famines and epidemics up to the 19th century, little has been written on the subject. In the first half of the 20th century, six more of these famines occurred, the most dramatic being those that took place in the 1940s. Amidst this silence, there is a remarkable document authored by the Portuguese Navy lieutenant commander, the Cape Verdean Christiano José de Senna Barcellos, a member of the Lisbon Academy of Sciences, published in 1904 by the Military Cooperative Printing Office, entitled "The Famines in Cape Verde from 1719 to 1904" . It describes the enormous disinterest of the metropolis in the fate of the people of Cape Verde. We quote an excerpt from this book, which is difficult to read today: “In 1903, the government provoked a crisis on the island of Santiago due to a lack of small, well-directed measures taken in time; the death toll rose to over 20,000 souls; in July, at the beginning of the rainy season, no care was taken to distribute seeds to guarantee the 1904 harvest for the few who survived. (…) In the Ministry of the Navy, since 1900, the opinion had been expressed that those suffering from droughts should not be helped, because that was the opinion of the governors of the time.” Despite this detailed description, there are few accounts and almost no documentation about famines prior to 1700, as described in the book: “Of the food crises in Cape Verde, which became notable for the high mortality rate among the population, those of 1748 to 1750; 1773 to 1775; 1831 to 1833; 1864 to 1866, which lasted more than 3 years, are highlighted. There are countless others lasting one year, starting in 1719; prior to this, it was natural that there were others, but no documents on this subject were found in public archives. In 1719, it is only known that there was famine in Santiago, and it is probable that the other islands suffered; but we found nothing in official documents about the measures taken by the government.” This immense tragedy received little news coverage in Portugal and internationally and went unnoticed by most of the Portuguese population. Later, literature revisited the theme and historians identified it for study, but this was already in the 20th century.
Later we will discuss the reasons for this and other famines, but here two common characteristics are already evident: a mixture of climatic conditions (in this case, water deficit and irregular rainfall, which, combined with the small size of the properties and the steep slopes of the plots, produce high rates of erosion, constituting the main threat to the agricultural sector) and poor human management (specifically, the inattention given by the colonial authorities and the colonial production structure itself, as Jacinto Augusto Lourenço in his work "Droughts and Famines in Cape Verde at the Dawn of the 20th Century – The 1901-1904 Crisis. Causes and Consequences").
In the 1940s alone, famines were responsible for the death of almost 50% of the Cape Verdean population. On the island of Santiago, the population decreased by 65% during the 1947-1948 crisis (some died, some were transported to other places in the then Portuguese empire, namely São Tomé and Príncipe and Angola) (António Carreira. Revista de História Económica e Social. No. 15 (1985), pp. 135-150). Little was known or publicly discussed about these tragedies at the time.
The famines in Mao's China
The "Great Leap Forward" was a campaign launched by Mao Zedong between 1958 and 1960, which aimed to make the People's Republic of China a developed nation. Due to a series of administrative and scientific errors, coupled with years of heavy rainfall and brutal repression, a widespread famine occurred between 1959 and 1961. The "Great Chinese Famine," as it is commonly called, is widely considered the deadliest famine and one of the greatest man-made disasters in human history, with an estimated death toll ranging from 15 to 55 million.
In addition to attempting to nationalize agricultural production and collectivize all land and means of production, the central government decreed several changes in agricultural techniques based on the ideas of the Russian pseudoscientist Trofim Lysenko. One of these ideas was dense planting, where the density of crops was initially tripled and subsequently doubled again. The theory was that plants of the same species do not compete with each other, a factually incorrect idea that caused poor crop growth and low harvests. These and other failed agricultural experiments resulted in great human losses, which were very little reported at the time. The historiography of the Chinese Communist Party excluded the suffering and hunger of the peasants in its official speeches and later attributed a substantial part of the blame to the environment and floods. Only much later was it realized that changes in the courses of the rivers had actually occurred, but with "administrative" and not "environmental" faults.
How can famines be explained?
According to some authors, until 1710 the main famine clusters occurred during periods of historically high population density with a nearby natural cause, often meteorological. Most pre-industrial famines resulted from a lack of production, not from distribution problems. For example, the "Great Famine of 1315-1317," considered the worst food crisis of the late Middle Ages, was triggered by persistent rains and low temperatures during the summer of 1315, causing a population decline of about 10% in several European countries. This relationship seems to disappear after 1710, when famines caused by human activity became prevalent. Among this line of thought, we can find researchers such as Guido Alfani and Cormac Ó Gráda . For them, the correlation between population pressure and famine tends to disappear from the European continent around 1710, although in some areas this happened later (in Italy, around 1770), while in England, much earlier (around 1630). Only from this period onwards did elites and political action begin to play a more significant role in the emergence of episodes of famine and associated mortality.
Other thinkers, such as Amartya Sen , place human action at the center of the problem, emphasizing that "there are no apolitical food problems." For this Nobel Prize winner in Economics, who has studied the problem of food insecurity in depth, "while drought and other naturally occurring events can cause famine, it is the action or inaction of the government that determines its severity and often determines whether famine will occur or not." In this line of thought , socioeconomic and political structures are frequently included as key factors in the outbreak of famine episodes, since they define the resistance and resilience of a given society to adversity.
In the future, we believe that the pressure of nature, and in particular climate change, on productive structures will once again gain greater influence as a determinant of episodes of severe food insecurity. And this climate pressure will have a greater influence on regions that are less technologically and politically prepared. Indeed, the latest report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, created within the framework of the United Nations on climate change mitigation (Working Group III), published on April 4, 2022, reveals the scale of the climate collapse and the need for urgent international cooperation. As a consequence, losses in agricultural crops will become more frequent, forest fires will be more intense and frequent, and there may be a progressive loss of agricultural soils. Water scarcity and soil loss will force migrations from south to north, which are already occurring. In other words, just as before 1710, atmospheric variations and their influence on food production will once again play an increasingly relevant role in the emergence of famine phenomena.
How to measure hunger in populations – The concept of food security
The emergence of the concept of food insecurity marks an important advance in the study of food deprivation, although it is not without its critics. This advance is essentially due to the breadth of the definition, which goes far beyond situations of hunger, as well as the possibility of categorizing food insecurity into different levels of severity.
The concept of food insecurity is multidimensional, and its definition has evolved over time as its main determinants have been identified. The term "food security" emerged during World War I (1914-1918) and began to be conceptualized after World War II (1945), particularly with the establishment of the United Nations (UN). In this initial period, food security was closely associated with the availability of food in sufficient quantities to feed the entire population, and its guarantee implied the existence of agricultural policies aimed at increasing productivity. The first official definition of food security proposed by the FAO, the UN organization created for agriculture and food issues, only appeared in the 1970s. In this first official definition, availability, associated with the existence of a strategic food storage policy, stands out as the key factor for guaranteeing food security – "the permanent availability of an adequate global supply of basic foodstuffs to maintain a regular expansion of food consumption and compensate for fluctuations in production and prices". During the 1980s, a paradigm shift occurred in the concept of food security. The productivity gains achieved during the 1970s and 1980s demonstrated that food security depended not only on the availability of food in sufficient quantities and on a permanent basis, but also on the conditions of physical and economic access to food by populations, particularly the most disadvantaged. Thus, in 1983, the FAO presented a new definition for the concept of food security that incorporated the dimension of access – "ensuring that all people have physical and economic access to the basic foods they need". The dimension of access thus emerged associated with poverty as an important determinant of food security, and the work on poverty and hunger by Amartya Sen contributed greatly to this redefinition of the concept. In the 1990s, the concern with nutritional adequacy was integrated into the definition of food security, and thus, in 1996, food security was defined as "access to sufficient, safe and nutritionally adequate food to meet nutritional needs and preferences for an active and healthy life". Finally, in 2001, the concept of food security was redefined again, now understood as – “a situation that exists when all people, at any given time, have physical, social and economic access to sufficient, safe and nutritionally adequate food that allows them to meet their nutritional needs and food preferences for an active and healthy life”. This multidimensional evolution of the concept and the fact that it integrates the dimensions of nutritional quality and the social and cultural acceptability of food make the assessment of food security more demanding, but at the same time allow for more qualified and efficient interventions by institutions and those responsible for public policies. The new definitions of food security place the human being, with their biological, but also social and cultural needs, at the center of the intervention, overcoming the previous dichotomous concepts associated with hunger, which was and is an extreme consequence of situations of severe food insecurity. On the other hand, in many parts of the world, although severe food insecurity does not exist, different situations of food insecurity persist in their milder forms with more relevant consequences because they affect higher proportions of the world's population.
Despite the broad scope of the concept of food security having presented numerous challenges to its assessment and measurement, in the 1990s the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) developed an instrument for assessing food insecurity that is currently widely used internationally. This instrument – the food insecurity scale – allows for measuring individuals' perception of the food security situation of their household and assessing everything from concern about the possible lack of access to food in the future to situations where there is an actual restriction on food consumption.
Food insecurity in Portugal
In Portugal, sporadic phenomena of food insecurity have been described in some population pockets in recent centuries, but the most frequent description is of extreme poverty and associated food insecurity, which is recurrent in various parts of the country. Just to revisit the 20th century, more than 431,738 people lived in Lisbon in 1911. Of these people, 138,742 resorted to "food assistance" through food vouchers for "a complete dinner" at the Lisbon Society for the Protection of Economic Kitchens, created in 1893 by Maria Luísa de Sousa Holstein Beck – Duchess of Palmela – with the aim of helping the needy population, especially workers, with meals at affordable prices. In other words, 32% of Lisbon's population relied on this food aid, which can be an indicator for measuring poverty, with an additional percentage of the even more needy population not even acquiring a complete meal, but only a part of it, such as bread or soup. Later, in 1917 , the newspaper O Século created "Soup for the Poor," with the help of parishes, and raised funds through charity events such as festivals and bullfights.
This was certainly due to the poor living conditions of the population, with a "deficient diet" (bread was expensive, and fish, meat, butter, among others, had high prices due to taxes and customs duties) and the poor quality of housing, especially in the "large" urban centers. To get an idea of the price of food , we can mention that a liter of milk corresponded to 18% of a worker's salary, and a dozen eggs was equivalent to 60%. The average daily wage in 1917 was 60 reis and, in 1924, it was 8$50. A working-class family in 1910 spent 80% of their salary on food, 10% on rent, and an equal percentage (5%) on clothing and other household expenses.
In 1951, António Augusto Mendes Corrêa, anthropologist and Director of the Institute of Anthropology at the University of Porto, and one of the first people to attempt to identify and classify food consumption in Portugal through surveys, published the masterful work – “The Food of the Portuguese People” (A Alimentação do povo português. Revista do Centro de Estudos Demográficos. Vol 6. INE, 1949). In this work, he compiles a large part of the studies evaluating food intake produced up to that point and offers a cautious description of the national food situation due to the poor quality of the data and the possible biases of the authors who had previously assessed the situation. In any case, Mendes Corrêa defines the situation as follows: “What is undeniable is that, always and almost everywhere, for some who eat too much, there are many who eat too little.” Among the works described in his book, the one by agronomist Quartin Graça on the diet of the rural population stands out: “In Portugal, both quantitatively and especially quantitatively, rural people eat poorly, their diet being characterized by the monotony resulting from the use of a limited number of foods, except in places where they cultivate a vegetable garden for their own consumption, which allows for greater diversity in the diet. Economic reasons largely motivate this monotony, since, seeking to feed themselves with the products of the land, which are cheaper and more abundant, they preferentially resort to cereals, followed by vegetables, potatoes and beans, and possibly other horticultural products (...). Eggs, milk, butter and cheese are considered by rural populations to be luxury items that they only consume exceptionally, generally destined for markets. Result: a low percentage of animal protein in the ration; and a number of deficiency diseases resulting from avitaminosis, such as rickets, spread throughout the country; "Dental caries, likewise, and especially in the Douro; pellagra, in Minho and other regions where the consumption of cornbread predominates. This deficiency in the diet of a large part of the Portuguese rural population is clearly evidenced by the records of military inspections.” (Quartin Graça. Problems of rural life, Chapter VIII – The defense of the health and nutrition of rural people, Rural Library No. 5, Lisbon, 1945).
This survival diet, very characteristic of subsistence agriculture in the Mediterranean, which was based on locally sourced plant products, cereals when weather conditions permitted (generally scarce in wheat), and small amounts of animal protein, remained practically unchanged in Portugal until the 1960s. It was a dietary pattern of resilience to periodic droughts and other atmospheric changes that forced the population, which lived essentially from agriculture, to adapt. Drought, particularly when it lasted for more than a year, caused a shortage of pastures, cereals, and many other temporary crops. The food and social strategies adopted in these situations of food crisis are well described in European literature . Reduced birth rates, postponed marriages, or migrations were frequent at these times. Farmers tried to diversify agricultural production, attempting to choose crops better adapted to water scarcity, low temperatures, or excess water. From a nutritional standpoint, during these times, populations returned to consuming parts of foods that had previously been rejected, such as plant stalks or animal entrails. They also resorted to producing food and meals from alternative food products like wild herbs or food scraps, resulting in meals with lower nutritional value and digestibility. The diversity of the Mediterranean dietary pattern also combined the tradition of wild gathering (everything that came to hand was welcome in times of scarcity), from bivalves in coastal areas to nettles, mushrooms, or purslane that grew spontaneously outside gardens, to the use of protein sources such as legumes, generally dried, like lentils, chickpeas, and beans, and energy sources such as nuts and nuts, notably figs and almonds. The diversity of food sources was an important lesson in the fight against food shortages, which unfortunately did not happen in the Irish famine of the 1840s, a population dependent on potato monoculture, or in the French population during the Great Famine of 1708, dependent on wheat. As we will see later, diversity decreased instead of increasing in subsequent years, and may be at the origin of the famines of the 21st century.
If our food history was shaped up until the 1960s by ancestral factors of a natural (climate and soil), social, cultural and political nature, which took centuries to establish, from that decade onwards, and in particular from the 1970s, we have witnessed a progressive acceleration in the change of food consumption habits in the Portuguese population, bringing us ever closer to industrialized Europe and the Western way of eating .
" In 1960 , the Portuguese had a dietary pattern with some similarities to other Southern European countries, what we could call a Mediterranean, plant-based dietary pattern, in which meat was not very prominent and olive oil was the main, and practically the only, vegetable fat consumed. Between 1960 and 1980, the availability of milk increased from 71.9 g to 202.3 g per capita per day, that is, it experienced an increase of 181%; the same happened with cheese, which almost doubled its daily availability, going from 6.3 g to 12.3 g per capita per day. The data relating to the evolution of the quantities of meat available daily to national residents clearly demonstrate this approximation to the Western consumption pattern. The availability of beef for consumption increased from 51.4 g to 129.2 g per capita per day, that is, an increase of 151%. The same happened with pork, which experienced an increase of..." 60%, and poultry, 1379%, that is, an increase from 3.69 g to 50.9 g per inhabitant per day. This consumption model, approximating what was consumed in Central Europe, curiously, does not entirely negate the products of our Mediterranean tradition. With the exception of olive oil, which, between the 1960s and 1980s, suffered a negative variation of 39% in its availability and a slight decrease in the availability of fruit (-15%), what is detected is an increase in everything that is of high energy value, as if the Portuguese were all interested in gaining weight and adhering to the metabolic dysregulation that, years later, will make Portugal a case study in the increased prevalence of diabetes, childhood obesity, or hypertension. In these two decades, the availability of food products associated with development and modernity increased considerably. For example, margarine increased by 590%, oils by 441%, butter by 33%, and soft drinks... 748%, sugar 63%, and beer 788%. This convergence with so-called Western food consumption patterns is not unique to Portugal, but is repeated throughout Southern Europe.”
This accelerated shift in availability patterns will make certain foods more accessible, both physically and economically. In particular, because food processing will incorporate preservatives and flavorings such as salt, sugar, and low-cost fat into the food chain. These low-priced, long-shelf-life, highly convenient, and appealing foods will increasingly integrate into the diets of the most disadvantaged populations. This preference is undoubtedly influenced by the strong investment capacity in advertising for processed and ultra-processed food groups, which is not possible for fresh foods with lower profitability and without private labels. This change in the food system will be reflected in the patterns of food insecurity and the populations affected, which have changed considerably in recent decades. From rural populations with vitamin deficiencies, protein and energy deficiencies described in the 1940s and 50s, which represented a significant part of the national population, we have moved to peri-urban populations, which today are the majority groups. In these population groups, food is one of the most flexible items in the family budget, and they frequently resort to the lowest-cost categories, trying not to forgo complete meals and a social and cultural organization around the meal, which is a hallmark of Mediterranean culture. That is, there is a shift from a rural paradigm, with easy access to fresh, seasonal, plant-based foods, sometimes insufficient in energy and some nutrients, to a non-fresh, processed, often ultra-processed food model, based on the salt-sugar-fat trilogy and cheap protein, almost always high in calories but equally poor in many nutrients.
If we understand the concept of food security, according to the FAO, recognized as "a situation that exists when all people, at all times, have physical, social and economic access to sufficient, safe and nutritionally adequate food that allows them to meet their nutritional needs and food preferences for an active and healthy life," we can see that currently food insecurity in Europe and Portugal is no longer mainly related to food scarcity but has become increasingly related to poor nutritional quality. In other words, it is no longer primarily a quantitative deficiency but rather a qualitative one, with a pernicious long-term effect, perpetuating disease, inability to work, and poverty among the most disadvantaged classes.
Measuring Food Insecurity in Portugal
Throughout the 20th century, the population's food situation progressively changed, as indicated by national food balances, and at the end of the century, the level of food insecurity began to be effectively measured with greater precision and detail through regular and comparable tools, using validated scales that allow for the measurement of food insecurity in households.
In Portugal, the first exploratory study on the situation of Food Insecurity, using standardized questions, was carried out in 2003 by the National Institute of Health Dr. Ricardo Jorge (INSA) – “An Observation on “Food Insecurity”” and from 2005-2006, the National Health Survey (INS) began to include the collection of data relating to the Food Insecurity situation of the Portuguese population. These studies, in particular the INS, despite covering large groups of the population, used reduced versions of the international scales because the questions on Food Insecurity were integrated into more comprehensive surveys on other aspects of the respondents' health.
Between 2011 and 2014, the Infofamília survey (National Program for the Promotion of Healthy Eating). Its central objective was to contribute to understanding the food security situation of households in mainland Portugal who were simultaneously users of primary healthcare services of the National Health Service (SNS) during a particularly intense period of economic and social crisis. During this period, a total of 4872 questionnaires were completed (1178, 1208, 1382, and 1104 questionnaires in the years 2011, 2012, 2013, and 2014 respectively). This allowed, for the first time, an assessment, in consecutive years, of the food insecurity situation in a substantial sample of the resident population in Portugal, using a food insecurity scale adapted from the Brazilian food insecurity scale, originally developed by the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA).
Later, in the period 2015-2016, the National Food and Physical Activity Survey , incorporating an assessment of food insecurity levels among the non-institutionalized resident population in Portugal, aged between 3 months and 84 years. Food insecurity is assessed through the application of the questionnaire developed by Cornell/Radimer, adapted for Portugal. This questionnaire provides estimates of food insecurity for households with and without children under 18 years of age, collecting information on four underlying dimensions and the experience of food insecurity: availability, access, utilization, and stability/resilience.
Between 2015-2016, the third evaluation wave of the Epidemiology of Chronic Diseases Cohort Study (EpiDoC 3) . The EpiDoC cohort was designed to study determinants and outcomes of health, non-communicable chronic diseases, and their impact on the consumption of health resources. The EpiDoC cohort included 10,661 non-institutionalized adults (over 18 years of age) residing in private households on the mainland and islands (Azores and Madeira) of Portugal (9). The objective of this latest study (EpiDoc 3) was to investigate the prevalence of food insecurity, the association of food insecurity with sociodemographic and economic determinants, and the impact on health status and the consumption of other health resources. Food insecurity was assessed using a scale adapted and validated for the Portuguese population from the Brazilian Food Insecurity Scale, which was adapted from the US Household Food Security Survey Module (USDA).
Later, during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, the REACT-COVID . This study, led by the Directorate-General of Health, aimed to understand dietary and physical activity behaviors in the context of social distancing measures implemented to combat the COVID-19 pandemic. The study included two distinct data collection periods. The first period took place in April and May 2020, during the initial period of social distancing resulting from the National State of Emergency, and the second data collection period (REACT-COVID 2.0) took place between May and June 2021. The study sample consisted of 4930 participants (aged 18 or older) and included questions about food insecurity using a reduced scale.
These large-scale national studies were complemented by others of a more restricted scope at the regional level, but they clearly demonstrate Portugal's capacity to regularly assess food insecurity, allowing us to have a good "snapshot" of the national situation and its specificities and influences.
Solving hunger
Attempts to resolve acute food shortages have generally been delayed and almost always began when a significant portion of the population was already experiencing severe food insecurity. Prevention of these situations, based on mathematical models of weather forecasting combined with data on local food production or other factors, is very recent and has only emerged in recent years, and is still very little applied.
The pursuit of food self-sufficiency in the 20th and 21st centuries and associated political errors
Attempts to guarantee sufficient food, in quantity and quality, for the general population as a goal of public policies emerged in the second half of the 20th century, although in the first decades of that century, several totalitarian-based political projects arose that aimed at food autarky and ended more or less tragically for the populations. As Professor Francisco Avillez in the “Gulbenkian/Público Conference Cycle – “The Future of Food, Environment, Health and Economy” on June 14, 2012: “The food self-sufficiency of a given country is the capacity to satisfy the food consumption needs of its population, through its domestic production and/or the importation of food financed by corresponding exports.” In these cases from the beginning of the 20th century, what was attempted was something different; that is, the aim was to produce internally everything necessary to primarily satisfy all the country's food needs and eventually export, if possible, as a secondary objective – this is called autarky.
The most well-known case occurred in Ukraine and gave rise to the Great Ukrainian Famine (1932-1933). Ukraine, the breadbasket of the world, had always been highly coveted. In 1929, Stalin imposed the nationalization of all Ukrainian agricultural properties that were then part of the Soviet empire. The appropriation by the Soviet state of the fertile Ukrainian lands, crops, livestock, and all machinery would allow the state to supply Soviet cities and armed forces, as well as export abroad. Small farms and their owners resisted. According to some authors , more than 50,000 farmers and their families were deported to Siberia. Stalin's goal was to make Ukraine a huge collective producer of grain for the entire empire, but in 1932 he realized that this goal would largely fail. To punish the apparent inefficiency of Ukrainian farmers, he confiscated all their food and prevented food aid from abroad. Thus, he began to punish all the “saboteurs” and took the opportunity to suppress thousands of Ukrainian intellectuals, books, and even banned the language itself. Millions of farmers fled and tried to take refuge in the cities. In various parts of Ukraine, police roadblocks were set up at railway stations and on roads leading to cities. In February 1933 alone, 220,000 people were detained, mostly peasants looking for food. Of these, 190,000 were forced to return to their villages to die of starvation. It is estimated that 3.9 million Ukrainians died directly as a result of the famine. With a labor shortage, the regime relocated thousands of Russian farmers to the region, but the damage was already done. Many historians have considered this restriction on access to food to be intentional and specific to a group of the population with the aim of deliberate extermination motivated by ethnic and national differences, and thus it can be considered a “genocide”. In 2018, a U.S. Senate committee deemed this period, or "Holodomor"—a combination of the Ukrainian words for "famine" and "inflicting death"—a genocide.
In Portugal, the insufficiency of cereal production to meet consumption needs is a historical problem. Unlike Ukraine, our land is of poorer quality, and the area capable of producing wheat is very small. We have been buying wheat from abroad practically since the time of Afonso III. Our bread-making tradition has always incorporated cereals from less fertile lands, such as rye and barley, and only later corn or wheat in smaller quantities, resulting in our mixed breads, the prime example of which is corn and rye bread. To address this persistent wheat deficit, Salazar launched the "Wheat Campaign" Its objective was to achieve food self-sufficiency, that is, to increase the capacity to produce enough wheat to supply the national population's consumption. To increase arable land and improve productive capacity per hectare, wooded forests were destroyed and large areas of cork oaks were cleared, creating open agricultural landscapes without trees and intensive cereal cultivation. The expansion of mechanized wheat farming also destroys holm oaks and accelerates soil degradation. As a result of this intervention, the entire environmental system surrounding the cork oak forest is modified, with the reduction or elimination of grazing, fallow systems, and the population that depended on this agricultural model. Water erosion increases, as does the use of herbicides and fertilizers, with a consequent reduction in biodiversity. Beyond the attempt to intensify wheat production on land poorly suited for cereal production, the "Wheat Campaign" sought to attract farmers and, essentially, seasonal day laborers from other regions to the interior of Alentejo, altering the existing social structure but not reducing the profound social inequalities already present. Curiously, due to the higher yields of the 1931 and 1936 harvests, the price of wheat suffered a sharp devaluation, contributing in the medium term to the demobilization surrounding this initiative. With the subsequent failure and abandonment of this agricultural strategy, depopulation, aging, and migration of rural populations increased. In fact, transforming land capable of producing world-class wine, almonds, or olive oil into wheat production zones , in uncompetitive quantity and quality, was not the most desirable way to utilize our natural, human, and financial resources in an economically and environmentally sustainable manner.
Today, history is repeating itself in Ukraine with the Russian attempt to subjugate the population and capture the world's most fertile plains, located precisely in eastern Ukraine, namely in the provinces of Kharkiv, Dnipropetrovsk, and Zaporizhzhya. In these regions, the soil profile is uniform, deep, fertile, very dark, and rich in organic matter on the surface, with a high capacity for moisture retention, making Ukraine the country with the tenth largest arable area in the world. This encompasses more than 339,000 square kilometers, mainly composed of ultra-fertile soils. This explains why the country is among the world's ten largest producers of wheat, corn, barley, rye, and potatoes, and is also the largest global exporter of sunflower oil. To obtain this enormous agricultural and energy wealth, Putin will use strategies very similar to Stalin's. The fight against "saboteurs" and "nationalists," the use of deportations, extermination through starvation and annihilation of opponents with the destruction of the productive and industrial sector. No longer in the villages as in the past, but now in the cities where most of the population is concentrated.
Beyond self-sufficiency
Beyond increasing agricultural productivity, combating food insecurity, as we currently understand the concept, lies in the ability to provide society and all citizens with solutions and a supply of food in adequate quantity and quality of food and nutrition at an appropriate cost (monetary and access-related), while simultaneously ensuring that this supply is sought after and desired. We would also add to this equation the new issues of environmental sustainability. In other words, a security model that allows us to combat future famines will no longer only combat traditional famines due to food and calorie shortages, but increasingly also famines caused primarily by nutritional inadequacies resulting from cheap, low-quality foods that have become the preferred food source for the most socially and economically disadvantaged.
This model would also allow us to combat obesity and associated diseases (diabetes, hypertension, cancer, etc.) which are currently strongly linked to social gradients, being more prevalent in the most disadvantaged populations from an educational and economic standpoint. In Portugal, for example, obesity, diabetes, and hypertension have ceased to be chronic diseases that mainly affected the upper classes and have become diseases with a higher proportion of affected individuals in the less educated and probably lower-income classes. Faced with these changes, we need a model that overcomes the vicious cycle caused by climate change, conflicts, and related migrations that will lead to more poverty and food insecurity, which in turn will lead to more acute and chronic diseases in these populations, making them less independent and fueling this cycle of poverty.
This model should attempt to overcome the syndemic phenomena we have previously , namely the synergy between epidemics of malnutrition (obesity and undernutrition) and climate change. These are two global problems of a complex nature, with common social causes and determinants, and consequences for human and planetary health. “Food systems, due to their current configuration, which promotes intensive agriculture, animal protein production, or the massive transport of food via road systems, end up favoring the existence of processed foods with high energy density and low nutritional value at low cost. This fuels obesity and malnutrition pandemics, but also generates 25-30% of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. If this model of food production, consumption, and transport accelerates climate change, then these changes, should they occur, will ultimately increase the risk of malnutrition among the most vulnerable populations with the least resilience to extreme weather events such as droughts, floods, or sudden changes in the prices of basic food products.”
We could also include two phenomena in this equation, one more recent and the other growing. The first is the addition of infectious diseases to chronic diseases as a new way to increase the disease-climate change-malnutrition cycle. The emergence of Covid-19 has highlighted, in our densely populated societies, the importance of infectious disease which, moreover (in the case of Covid-19, yes, but not only), is synergistic with chronic diseases. Inadequate nutrition, which promotes inflammation and ultimately obesity, seems to be a determining factor in the severity of SARS-CoV-2 infection. In fact, COVID-19 affects obese, diabetic, and hypertensive individuals more severely —chronic diseases where inflammatory processes are increased. These are chronic diseases where nutrition can play a central role, not only in disease prevention but also in their metabolic control. If these people, with these chronic diseases, are also the most economically disadvantaged and vulnerable to food prices, increasing their consumption of pro-inflammatory food products high in sugar, salt, and fat—which will be the cheapest options during times of crisis—we could face a (unfortunate) perfect storm in terms of public health in the coming years.
Some solutions in the midst of a big problem
Global hunger and varying levels of food insecurity require a global shift in agricultural production models, governance, and wealth distribution to be resolved. While this is not the central focus of this text, we will only discuss the European context and what we can do locally in response to the situation described above.
The problems of hunger and food insecurity can be approached in different ways. Some approaches will be more suited to the global food system, while others will be more suited to the individual citizen, at a more local level. The concepts of diversity and rationality, two central concepts in the glossary of nutritionists since the 1970s in Portugal, and in particular at the Porto School of Nutrition, can once again be presented and used in this context.
Diversity is the basis of the most resilient traditional dietary patterns in the face of food shortages, namely the Mediterranean diet. For biological reasons, we need a huge diversity of nutrients from a wide variety of animal and plant sources. On the other hand, the variety of food sources allows for biodiversity and survival when one supplier cannot meet demand. Monocultures have always caused famine and dependency in Europe in recent centuries. Currently, we are once again concentrating much of food production in the hands of a few "players," which may pose a risk to the global food system, both in terms of supply and biodiversity. According to a recent Oxfam , "currently only seven countries, plus the European Union, are responsible for 90% of the world's wheat exports and only four countries for 87% of corn exports." Furthermore, only four companies control between 80 and 90% of the global cereal trade (Archer Daniels Midland, Bunge, Cargill, and Louis Dreyfus, known as the ABCD group) . In the food industry, concentration is increasingly high, and the same is happening in distribution in some European countries. We need a diversified food system, whenever possible locally sourced, but at the same time efficient, both in terms of production capacity and environmental protection. For this to happen, international cooperation will be fundamental, ensuring that the most capable agricultural areas produce what they do best and trying to transport food with less impact on the environment, while preserving the diversity of local production and supporting its producers. This is the greatest challenge for European food systems, requiring rationality in production and efficient management of natural resources, which is sometimes not possible in self-sufficiency models.
But preserving diversity also requires the contribution of citizens. The role of citizens and their ability to produce meals from a genuine diversity in the origin of food products is crucial. This will require mastering culinary techniques and knowledge that allow for diverse cooking throughout the week at low cost, access to and critical recognition of the provenance of food, particularly fresh vegetables, and ensuring that this consumption is accessible both economically and in terms of family time. This represents a huge challenge for food education in the various European education systems and for labor legislators at the European level, in order to allow "time to shop, cook and eat" to regain importance in the daily lives of workers.
Another important concept in this model is rationality, or rational eating, necessary to avoid wasting so much and spending so much unnecessarily. The rationality that in the Mediterranean diet is called "frugality" begins with combating the excessive consumption of a range of food products that are completely unnecessary in the human diet from a nutritional point of view, such as soft drinks, certain sweets and candies, salty snacks, and various ultra-processed foods (and their packaging), generally high in calories, fat, sugar, and salt, and low in nutrients. Rationality also requires thinking about food waste, when we know that 40% of what we produce in the EU is never consumed and that more than 67% of the cereals we produce or buy from outside the EU are destined for animal feed , while the average consumption of meat, fish, and eggs in Portugal is more than double what is recommended by our Food Wheel. We must combat this food schizophrenia with greater rationality.
As we said at the beginning, the problem is complex and rests on a balance between providing immediate and prompt support to those most in need and, at the same time, preparing solutions to minimize these problems in the future, within a food system that has changed profoundly in recent years and where obesity and hunger now coexist, increasingly so in the most disadvantaged population groups. For complex problems like this, we need a technically well-prepared workforce with a strong ethical sense and an awareness of the power of its voice in decision-making. We hope to have contributed to this discussion.
Written by
Pedro Graça, Director of the Faculty of Nutrition and Food Sciences at the University of Porto
